Lead Yourself First

Lead Yourself First highlights the importance of solitude, sorting your mind, and self-awareness in leading others, recommending strongly aligned goals and an inspiring mission to get others to take initiative on your shared objectives.

Solitude is one of the most powerful tools of a leader. Why? Because it allows for unstructured time for the mind to recenter and run deeper cognitive processes. Oftentimes, this leads to breakthrough discoveries and better coordination of activities, if we embrace it and choose not to respond to all external stimuli, or the tsunami of inputs, as the author calls them.

From responding to emails to spot-checking notifications, these are all part of the super-human model that modern leaders are trying to achieve. Unfortunately, it leads to decreased productivity and creativity, and an increase in anxiety and frustration.

Therefore, the book suggests using solitude to gain leverage over four aspects: clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage. We’ll focus more on clarity, as the purpose of this book is to help you become a better leader. Clarity implies switching off your connection to the outside world once in a while to have time to recharge and gain a clearer perspective.

The constant input of distractions can throw you off your balance, and you can’t afford that. Sitting in solitude and practicing introspection is what great leaders do. And doing so will facilitate great ideas coming to you.

The fear of missing out keeps many people in the same vicious loop they find hard to break and for a reason! The constant flux of stimuli rewired us to constantly check pop-up notifications, emails, news, and feel bad when we don’t. How many of you can honestly say that if you receive a message, you won’t jump to check it out? Not too many! However, when we’re engaged in a task or we’re running some errands, FOMO can really distract our attention from work, which will likely result in a poor outcome. Hence, if you think you can multitask, you’ll have to think again. The author is firm that you should focus 100% on your craft and not give course to external stimuli. Otherwise, your final product is going to be of lower quality. In solitude, our creativity and emotional intelligence grow. And our brain has a “moment of respiro” to catch up on ideas and insights. Turning off our phones and banning distractions will be highly beneficial in the long run. Even though we feel that we’ll be missing out on important updates. Make peace with the thought that you’re missing out by telling yourself that you can catch up any time. And that it’s no big deal if you subtract yourself from the outside world…